Joe User plays their games on a PS2. Or the web. Windows games are fast becoming a geeks-only thing--soon, PC gaming will be even more obscure than Linux.
The answer is: some of both, but a lot of the former.
Nah, the latter is definitely the big player in human civilization. Until the twentieth century, the realities of economics have compelled the vast majority of children to fill their lives with complete drudgework. From sowing seeds to sewing clothes, until the end of World War II most kids have had very little use for their brains. But even now that large sections of the world are prosperous enough to dedicate resources for 18 years or more to the preparation of future workers, we STILL raise our kids in an artificial environment designed to discourage creativity at all times. From the televisions we raise them in front of to the commercials they watch encouraging them to eat, from the schools that spend all day memorizing facts to the overworked parents that have been completely drained of all patience for the nurturing of childhood creativity--it's definitely mostly nurture, if not completely and totally nurture--while I see lots of claims that intelligence follows genetic lines (from twin studies and so forth) is their any evidence at all that creativity does as well? In other words, do you base your belief that the majority of people are genetically encoded against creativity rather than raised to be uncreative on anything other than misanthropy?
1), definitely, if that eccentric person happens to be the one you're relying on to fix your computer. If I say "use this program instead of this one, or I'm not coming back here", then chances are they're switch or it becomes some one else's problem. It's not grade-A ass at all--if I'm doing it for free, then continued usage of Internet Explorer obviously means that the continued functionality of their computer is worthless to them, and therefore isn't worth my time and effort.
If I'm doing it for money (which I don't, and I imagine the majority of people get their computers fixed by people who don't, but lots do), then they can find someone else, but trust ME, their computer will inevitably fail again (their using IE, right?) and why should they go back to the person who continues to tolerate usage of the part of their computer that is causing the problem? Allowing an ordinary home user to continue to use IE just because they insist on it is the equivalent of a doctor prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection just because the patient insists on it--it's dangerous to the health of both the patient and society at large.
Those CNN writeups (err...talkups..whatever) have been warning people for ages "don't click on attachments" but that never seems to sink in. TV is worthless for computer security.
No, buying commercials on TV or any other old media is just playing the game by their rules.
This definitely calls for word of mouth. Tell everyone you know that Internet Explorer will destroy your computer. Only service a friend or relative's computer running IE after making it perfectly clear that you are doing so under duress, and you won't bother to show up again to fix everything if they continue using IE, that security related doom (spyware, viruses, identity theft, whatever) is inevitable if IE use is continued.
Most people are not creative, and most hate to learn. This is a sad truth. The amount of people who like to learn new things throughout their life, or create things just for the sake of creating, is a thin sliver of the general population.
But we have to ask ourselves--is this by nature, or by nurture? Is lifelong creative drive a rare, recessive gene--or is it a potential that exists in most of us that's discouraged by both school and the workplace? If we gave people easier to use creative tools, would they retain this creativity longer?
And if creativity is TRULY only enjoyable by a minority, then isn't that minority the only subset of humanity worth wringing one's hands over?
As far as the rest of what Alan Kay I guess I mostly agree with you--he is saying that business is inherently conservative--but that's besides the point, because look at the massive amount of man power invested into open source and other non-profit endeavors by private invididuals--if the problems he describes were solvable by merely discarding business conservatism, they would have been solved already.
I think what Kay is really complaining about is that most people use computers more for communication--sending and receiving email, receiving content from major corporations--then for creation. But this shouldn't be a surprise--think about the total computing power of the billions of computers in the world, then compare that to the computing power of the billions of people in the world. Only a tiny slice of the computing powerof civilization is implemented in silicon--most is still in carbon. So, even to a programmer like me, communicating with other brains is still more valucable than communicating with machines.
What Kay misses is the naivete of computing that existed before the Internet was everyone's obsession--when everyone still felt that Computation and Simulation were still more important than Communication. In that sense, someday Kay will get his wish--computation power of silicon is growing a lot faster than human population, and perhaps even in my lifetime (though probably not Alan Kay's) silicon computation will be greater than human computation. Still, I'm not sure he'll actually like the result--I don't expect humans to have MORE opportunity for creativity once machines become capable of creativity. Unless we are actually integrated with the machines.
I think the biggest piece of bullshit was when he contrasted Microsoft Word with the Web--am I naive to think that 90% of people who would want to create a web page and have the economic means to do so are able to create a web page, or at least write a blog? Some web browsers DO have creative ability built in. The web is infested with creativity! Look at all these blogs, these amateur web comics, these open source programs, these complex CGI tricks and games (try doing that in Word, Alan!). Hell, I knew someone who credited practice from Slashdot flamewars with the 12 he got on the GRE Analytical Writing section. Even my sister, who absolutely REFUSES to ever do anything creative, insists on making a web page.
I think the biggest insight is contrasting Squek with current open source desktops. If Gnome and KDE are really about freedom, why do they have to be written in compiled languages that make it such a pain in the ass for end users to change and add features to them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of advanced statically typed languages, but it IS pretty cool how people can write extensions for emacs so easily. It would be cool if the same were true of all the apps on my GUI--though admittedly that would likely have performance and stability costs.
It's actually somewhat different. With Open Source, automation, or volunteer work, the "problem" is that work that was once done by X people is now down by Y people, with Y less than X and possibly even zero. But this is a net gain for society (assuming that macroeconomic policies are such as to maintain low unemployment) because it frees people to do other jobs. It's fairly cut and dry.
With outsourcing to foreign countries, you're talking about work that was once done by X domestic workers being done by X foreign workers. who are paid less. Completely different.
What stops you from using Outlook for mail/scheduling and Mozilla/Firefox for the web? Given recent security related events, the only correct answer to that is "insanity".
Bittorrent doesn't have a built in search engine, but it's probably the most mainstream (if one considers appearance of legitimacy rather than strict popularity) of all the P2P protocols/clients.
I don't think it has to do with being ivory tower--it's just that anonymity comes with a bandwidth/convenience cost, and at this time most people don't consider it worth paying. As computer resources increase, or political reality changes, anonymity might start to grow in relative importance.
I know they did. But look which party is voting (in the House, so neither Kerry nor Edwards gets a chance to climb on board) to remove the offending parts, and which party became obsessed with making sure Ashcroft can still check your library books.
If you are going to stay ideologically pure, fine, but if you ARE going to defect from the Libertarian party, Bush and friends have made it very clear that you are absolutely unwelcome in his party. He hates your guts.
You got so fired up about the PATRIOT act you suggested I should abandon my party allegience and vote along Democratic party lines because of this act.
No, actually, I'm just saying it would make more sense to vote Democrat than Republican if you're planning to abandon your party allegiance anyway--and judging by the election results, most of you guys DO abandon your allegiance, so there you go.
p.s. - as for the Tabacco farmer . . . . "no great tragedy"????
Wait, you're making that misspelling consistently--is their some kind of Tabacco that's different than Tobacco? If so, I apologize for maligning the Southern Tabacco industry.
How can you get this fired up about someone looking over your shoulder at the LIBRARY (which, by the way, when was the last time you were even IN a library...(not a personal attack you you, just, seriously, how often do people REALLY check out books at the library)
If you're a middle-class and middle-aged, it isn't that common to get books out of the library. Not everyone is.
and overlook the eradication of the single biggest economic product of most southern states!?
Well, you know, as a yankee software engineer I will NEVER be Tobacco farmer. So there you go;). Hey, it's just like when factories get automated and millions of manufacturing laborers get thrown on the streets--now those workers are free to contribute to the economy in other ways, and we're an overall more efficient country. While the tobacco lawsuits may not make sense philosophically or ethically, they certainly make sense economically and utilitarianly--those farmers were growing a product that made decreased the utilitarian good of people--consensually, yes, but the freedom to poison myself in the cheapest manner possible isn't as important to me as the Constitution.
Look, you may be in the Libertarian party, but you aren't Libertarian--you're just voting for you and yours. I can respect that, but it's weird that you're making a protest vote in favor of selfishness. Not selfishness in the abstract, either, but just in your own sphere of the economy. Usually, when someone votes for these sub 1% parties, idealism is the motivator. If you're just taking a "what's in it for me?" attitude, well, it probably doesn't even make sense to show up at the polling booth.
I can read the words . . . but I can't make out the meaning . ..
You sure are proud of your illiteracy.
And your illogical logic. The problem with the Patriot act isn't the government seeing which library books you've checked out--they can already do that with a court order. The problem is that now they can do this WITHOUT JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. The Patriot Act is great if we want to go back to the days of the Red Scare or J Edgar Hoover and Enemies Lists. Check out some Computer Security books and "House of Bush, House of Saud"? Obviously you're a leftist terrorist--the next John Walker! Don't confuse individual importance with aggregate importance--you're an insignificant nothing, but aggregated by a database together with all you're insignificant nothing friends, you become something harassing and controlling. They can send you to be detained indefinitely, and they don't even need to tell a judge. Bottom line is, you're a Libertarian in name only, and you shouldn't confuse your values with the value of that noble organization, even if you are voting for them out of habit.
By the way, something you might be interested in--even as many states are passing caps on tort limits, even as the number of lawsuits and size of payouts are both DECLINING in recent years, insurance premiums are still going up for everyone. (Yes, even in the states with tort limits.) That's not to say that tort reform isn't needed for its own reasons, but the simple limits proposed by the Republicans aren't doing any good, and rising costs of insurance have nothing to do with the double digit inflation we've been experiencing lately--for that, blame the investment losses of the insurance companies in the.COM market boom and bust.
Which is why I think it's bizarre how the last, dwindling contingent of right-wing libtertarians has fixated on the trial lawyers as their ultimate enemy--look at the commercials for ambulance chasers, look at the commericals for insurance companies, look at the commercials for pharmaceutical companies. Which set of commercials look like they were produced by someone with plenty of money to burn, with plenty of power to distort government regulation of the market place to their advantage? Ambulance chasers are pawns in this game just as much as doctors are. You can find some rich doctors, some rich lawyers. You don't find very many billionaire doctors or billionaire lawyers.
Sure, Bush makes a little bit of noise regarding adding free market reforms to health care--some meager steps towards decoupling employment and health insurance--but he's had four years with a rather compliant Congress to do so and done nothing. That he has still made no progress signifies he has no interest in attacking his major donors--the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the ones that really benefit from our strange hybrid government/market system.
Besides, if everyone had self control, the Southern Farmer wouldn't be able to sell his crop either, right? Tobacco lawsuits are stupid, but no great tragedy. Certainly nothing compared to illegal detentions. Or the fantastic increase in the size of government since Clinton left office, even excluding homeland defence and military.
Right, the accident injury law firms with cheap ads on late night and daytime television ARE SECRETLY CONTROLLING EVERYTHING! I should known! They track the position of every ambulance in the country!
I mean, geez, what can I say? The Libertarians are no longer opposed to government overstepping its bounds. Did I get transported to bizarro planet or something?
It's official, Democrats are the new "least of two evils" for Libertarians. I mean, it should have been obvious to you guys for quite some time that Republicans really hated your guts, but there's been a few holdouts, and hopefully this vote ends that. The Dems voted to roll it back, the Repubs voted to keep it as it is. Really cut and dry.
Right, we're gonna have to build some huge-ass, um, blast-panel-things embedded in the Moon perpendicular to the surface, on opposite sides of the Moon. We can then use more useful atomic explosions to change the Moon's rotation to be whatever we want it to be. I suggest making the axis of rotation perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, hanging a space elevator off the nearer lunar pole which, while spinning, should maintain the same position with respect to the earth. Whether the elevator should spin or we should spin with respect to the Earth or to the Moon is left as an exercise the reader. Finally, we need to carve patterns into the surface that would look cool when spinning, probably a spiral so that anyone who gazes at the Moon too long will be completely hypnotized--hypnotized by the miracle of American Engineering! This will be a fitting tribute to our now completely submerged land of purple mountains majesty or whatever.
Well, this is the bug you should probably be looking at: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=163648
One of the comments explains why this "bug" is so long in being "fixed"--it was suggested that a dialog should be popped up before launching any external app, (which Internet Explorer only started to do sometime this year), but this is inconsistent--external plugins, like Flash, don't get similar dialog boxes in any browser, even though such plugins have been exploited in the past. Also, some programs launch their own dialog warning the user of executing from untrusted environments, and having Mozilla also display a warning is redundant. Essentially, any program that registers itself as a plugin or web protocol is saying "I will take care of the security issues involved with my execution." Therefore, while known dangerous protocols like vbscript were blacklisted (that's why this particular bug is FIXED, even though the comments suggest awareness of the current problem), they didn't implement a whitelist (which I guess is the plan for 1.0) or a dialog box (which Internet Explorer now relies upon, foolishly) because it was not consistent with the behavior towards external plugins.
Presumably, with the bad press this has received, Mozilla has realized that Microsoft is going to put whatever-the-hell it wants to in as an external protocol, so unknown protocols should not be trusted. (Something that, apparently, Microsoft themselves has only realized in the last year or so.) shell: protocol is disabled in 0.9.2, and only whitelisted plugins will be trusted in 1.0. I think.
The only solution is to use a series of atomic explosions for a Hohmann transfer to put the moon in geosynchrous orbit! Which would produce a giantantic Moon always visible in the southern horizon of America! Which is now underwater due to tidal forces! Surf's up, Earthlings!
The "we" that you describe does not include all human beings on the planet. Lots of women manage to carry everything they want to drag around in their purse, and some men manage to carry everything in their pockets. Purses and pockets do not hold desktop-replacement laptops. If you're always carrying legal briefs or business reports or textbooks, fine, but I'm not sure that describes the majority of people in Western Civilization.
Never forget the human interface mantra: "the user is not like me".
Not to mention the side issue of batteries--maybe someday 12-hour laptop life will be the norm, but that day has not yet arrived. (Though I suppose it could arrive before mobile virtual machines arrive.)
Yes, people like to own things. But not carry them around. Back when I was in college, I owned a desktop computer (two!), but when I left my room I relied on the university's computer labs. That's not to say that NO ONE bought laptops--wireless was pretty popular--but even those who did still used labs occasionally if they were wanted larger monitors and keyboards or were working with a team of people who didn't have them, or simply didn't feel like carrying 3-10 pounds of extra crap with them, or had more than 2 or 3 hours of work to do outside their rooms.
Then when I left school, I got a laptop. Still, 80% of the times I leave my house, I'm not carrying either my iBook or TabletPC (the latter being only 2 pounds!) because it's just not worth carrying around extra, expensive to replace, baggage.
If I understand it correctly from the vague descriptions I've read, i think it's more like using Bochs or something similar to emulate a PC, and being able to suspend/restore/rollback the state of the emulator (just like zsnes! heh heh)--and also giving you the ability to restore and supend across a network.
It seems to me there are huge security risks involved with such an approach, but I haven't read very far.
Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work? I dunno, I think this could be cool, though the security problems seem basically unsolvable--typing on someone else's keyboard is never trustworthy, and how could we prevent a kiosk from being able to observe what your mobile virtual machine is doing?
Slashdot Mirror
Joe User plays their games on a PS2. Or the web. Windows games are fast becoming a geeks-only thing--soon, PC gaming will be even more obscure than Linux.
The answer is: some of both, but a lot of the former. Nah, the latter is definitely the big player in human civilization. Until the twentieth century, the realities of economics have compelled the vast majority of children to fill their lives with complete drudgework. From sowing seeds to sewing clothes, until the end of World War II most kids have had very little use for their brains. But even now that large sections of the world are prosperous enough to dedicate resources for 18 years or more to the preparation of future workers, we STILL raise our kids in an artificial environment designed to discourage creativity at all times. From the televisions we raise them in front of to the commercials they watch encouraging them to eat, from the schools that spend all day memorizing facts to the overworked parents that have been completely drained of all patience for the nurturing of childhood creativity--it's definitely mostly nurture, if not completely and totally nurture--while I see lots of claims that intelligence follows genetic lines (from twin studies and so forth) is their any evidence at all that creativity does as well? In other words, do you base your belief that the majority of people are genetically encoded against creativity rather than raised to be uncreative on anything other than misanthropy?
Hmm...I dunno..."I judge you"...this idea of posting ridiculous criticisms of everyone could work, but I don't think it's working yet. Keep trying!
If I'm doing it for money (which I don't, and I imagine the majority of people get their computers fixed by people who don't, but lots do), then they can find someone else, but trust ME, their computer will inevitably fail again (their using IE, right?) and why should they go back to the person who continues to tolerate usage of the part of their computer that is causing the problem? Allowing an ordinary home user to continue to use IE just because they insist on it is the equivalent of a doctor prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection just because the patient insists on it--it's dangerous to the health of both the patient and society at large.
Those CNN writeups (err...talkups..whatever) have been warning people for ages "don't click on attachments" but that never seems to sink in. TV is worthless for computer security.
Hey, did you think this one up yourself? This is definitely the most brilliant thing I have read this month!
This definitely calls for word of mouth. Tell everyone you know that Internet Explorer will destroy your computer. Only service a friend or relative's computer running IE after making it perfectly clear that you are doing so under duress, and you won't bother to show up again to fix everything if they continue using IE, that security related doom (spyware, viruses, identity theft, whatever) is inevitable if IE use is continued.
MS releases a crap load of patches in between service packs --hopefully they wouldn't have to wait to fix these ones.
But we have to ask ourselves--is this by nature, or by nurture? Is lifelong creative drive a rare, recessive gene--or is it a potential that exists in most of us that's discouraged by both school and the workplace? If we gave people easier to use creative tools, would they retain this creativity longer?
And if creativity is TRULY only enjoyable by a minority, then isn't that minority the only subset of humanity worth wringing one's hands over?
As far as the rest of what Alan Kay I guess I mostly agree with you--he is saying that business is inherently conservative--but that's besides the point, because look at the massive amount of man power invested into open source and other non-profit endeavors by private invididuals--if the problems he describes were solvable by merely discarding business conservatism, they would have been solved already.
I think what Kay is really complaining about is that most people use computers more for communication--sending and receiving email, receiving content from major corporations--then for creation. But this shouldn't be a surprise--think about the total computing power of the billions of computers in the world, then compare that to the computing power of the billions of people in the world. Only a tiny slice of the computing powerof civilization is implemented in silicon--most is still in carbon. So, even to a programmer like me, communicating with other brains is still more valucable than communicating with machines.
What Kay misses is the naivete of computing that existed before the Internet was everyone's obsession--when everyone still felt that Computation and Simulation were still more important than Communication. In that sense, someday Kay will get his wish--computation power of silicon is growing a lot faster than human population, and perhaps even in my lifetime (though probably not Alan Kay's) silicon computation will be greater than human computation. Still, I'm not sure he'll actually like the result--I don't expect humans to have MORE opportunity for creativity once machines become capable of creativity. Unless we are actually integrated with the machines.
I think the biggest piece of bullshit was when he contrasted Microsoft Word with the Web--am I naive to think that 90% of people who would want to create a web page and have the economic means to do so are able to create a web page, or at least write a blog? Some web browsers DO have creative ability built in. The web is infested with creativity! Look at all these blogs, these amateur web comics, these open source programs, these complex CGI tricks and games (try doing that in Word, Alan!). Hell, I knew someone who credited practice from Slashdot flamewars with the 12 he got on the GRE Analytical Writing section. Even my sister, who absolutely REFUSES to ever do anything creative, insists on making a web page.
I think the biggest insight is contrasting Squek with current open source desktops. If Gnome and KDE are really about freedom, why do they have to be written in compiled languages that make it such a pain in the ass for end users to change and add features to them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of advanced statically typed languages, but it IS pretty cool how people can write extensions for emacs so easily. It would be cool if the same were true of all the apps on my GUI--though admittedly that would likely have performance and stability costs.
With outsourcing to foreign countries, you're talking about work that was once done by X domestic workers being done by X foreign workers. who are paid less. Completely different.
What stops you from using Outlook for mail/scheduling and Mozilla/Firefox for the web? Given recent security related events, the only correct answer to that is "insanity".
I don't think it has to do with being ivory tower--it's just that anonymity comes with a bandwidth/convenience cost, and at this time most people don't consider it worth paying. As computer resources increase, or political reality changes, anonymity might start to grow in relative importance.
Of course, as David Hume pointed out, Natural and Good are two different things--but that's shoes for industry.
If you are going to stay ideologically pure, fine, but if you ARE going to defect from the Libertarian party, Bush and friends have made it very clear that you are absolutely unwelcome in his party. He hates your guts.
No, actually, I'm just saying it would make more sense to vote Democrat than Republican if you're planning to abandon your party allegiance anyway--and judging by the election results, most of you guys DO abandon your allegiance, so there you go.
p.s. - as for the Tabacco farmer . . . . "no great tragedy"????
Wait, you're making that misspelling consistently--is their some kind of Tabacco that's different than Tobacco? If so, I apologize for maligning the Southern Tabacco industry.
How can you get this fired up about someone looking over your shoulder at the LIBRARY (which, by the way, when was the last time you were even IN a library...(not a personal attack you you, just, seriously, how often do people REALLY check out books at the library)
If you're a middle-class and middle-aged, it isn't that common to get books out of the library. Not everyone is.
and overlook the eradication of the single biggest economic product of most southern states!?
Well, you know, as a yankee software engineer I will NEVER be Tobacco farmer. So there you go ;). Hey, it's just like when factories get automated and millions of manufacturing laborers get thrown on the streets--now those workers are free to contribute to the economy in other ways, and we're an overall more efficient country. While the tobacco lawsuits may not make sense philosophically or ethically, they certainly make sense economically and utilitarianly--those farmers were growing a product that made decreased the utilitarian good of people--consensually, yes, but the freedom to poison myself in the cheapest manner possible isn't as important to me as the Constitution.
Look, you may be in the Libertarian party, but you aren't Libertarian--you're just voting for you and yours. I can respect that, but it's weird that you're making a protest vote in favor of selfishness. Not selfishness in the abstract, either, but just in your own sphere of the economy. Usually, when someone votes for these sub 1% parties, idealism is the motivator. If you're just taking a "what's in it for me?" attitude, well, it probably doesn't even make sense to show up at the polling booth.
You sure are proud of your illiteracy.
And your illogical logic. The problem with the Patriot act isn't the government seeing which library books you've checked out--they can already do that with a court order. The problem is that now they can do this WITHOUT JUDICIAL OVERSIGHT. The Patriot Act is great if we want to go back to the days of the Red Scare or J Edgar Hoover and Enemies Lists. Check out some Computer Security books and "House of Bush, House of Saud"? Obviously you're a leftist terrorist--the next John Walker! Don't confuse individual importance with aggregate importance--you're an insignificant nothing, but aggregated by a database together with all you're insignificant nothing friends, you become something harassing and controlling. They can send you to be detained indefinitely, and they don't even need to tell a judge. Bottom line is, you're a Libertarian in name only, and you shouldn't confuse your values with the value of that noble organization, even if you are voting for them out of habit.
By the way, something you might be interested in--even as many states are passing caps on tort limits, even as the number of lawsuits and size of payouts are both DECLINING in recent years, insurance premiums are still going up for everyone. (Yes, even in the states with tort limits.) That's not to say that tort reform isn't needed for its own reasons, but the simple limits proposed by the Republicans aren't doing any good, and rising costs of insurance have nothing to do with the double digit inflation we've been experiencing lately--for that, blame the investment losses of the insurance companies in the .COM market boom and bust.
Which is why I think it's bizarre how the last, dwindling contingent of right-wing libtertarians has fixated on the trial lawyers as their ultimate enemy--look at the commercials for ambulance chasers, look at the commericals for insurance companies, look at the commercials for pharmaceutical companies. Which set of commercials look like they were produced by someone with plenty of money to burn, with plenty of power to distort government regulation of the market place to their advantage? Ambulance chasers are pawns in this game just as much as doctors are. You can find some rich doctors, some rich lawyers. You don't find very many billionaire doctors or billionaire lawyers.
Sure, Bush makes a little bit of noise regarding adding free market reforms to health care--some meager steps towards decoupling employment and health insurance--but he's had four years with a rather compliant Congress to do so and done nothing. That he has still made no progress signifies he has no interest in attacking his major donors--the insurance and pharmaceutical companies, the ones that really benefit from our strange hybrid government/market system.
Besides, if everyone had self control, the Southern Farmer wouldn't be able to sell his crop either, right? Tobacco lawsuits are stupid, but no great tragedy. Certainly nothing compared to illegal detentions. Or the fantastic increase in the size of government since Clinton left office, even excluding homeland defence and military.
I mean, geez, what can I say? The Libertarians are no longer opposed to government overstepping its bounds. Did I get transported to bizarro planet or something?
It's official, Democrats are the new "least of two evils" for Libertarians. I mean, it should have been obvious to you guys for quite some time that Republicans really hated your guts, but there's been a few holdouts, and hopefully this vote ends that. The Dems voted to roll it back, the Repubs voted to keep it as it is. Really cut and dry.
Right, we're gonna have to build some huge-ass, um, blast-panel-things embedded in the Moon perpendicular to the surface, on opposite sides of the Moon. We can then use more useful atomic explosions to change the Moon's rotation to be whatever we want it to be. I suggest making the axis of rotation perpendicular to the surface of the Earth, hanging a space elevator off the nearer lunar pole which, while spinning, should maintain the same position with respect to the earth. Whether the elevator should spin or we should spin with respect to the Earth or to the Moon is left as an exercise the reader. Finally, we need to carve patterns into the surface that would look cool when spinning, probably a spiral so that anyone who gazes at the Moon too long will be completely hypnotized--hypnotized by the miracle of American Engineering! This will be a fitting tribute to our now completely submerged land of purple mountains majesty or whatever.
Man, bugzilla is so confusing! They shouldn't even let us see it from Slashdot! Oh, wait...
One of the comments explains why this "bug" is so long in being "fixed"--it was suggested that a dialog should be popped up before launching any external app, (which Internet Explorer only started to do sometime this year), but this is inconsistent--external plugins, like Flash, don't get similar dialog boxes in any browser, even though such plugins have been exploited in the past. Also, some programs launch their own dialog warning the user of executing from untrusted environments, and having Mozilla also display a warning is redundant. Essentially, any program that registers itself as a plugin or web protocol is saying "I will take care of the security issues involved with my execution." Therefore, while known dangerous protocols like vbscript were blacklisted (that's why this particular bug is FIXED, even though the comments suggest awareness of the current problem), they didn't implement a whitelist (which I guess is the plan for 1.0) or a dialog box (which Internet Explorer now relies upon, foolishly) because it was not consistent with the behavior towards external plugins.
Presumably, with the bad press this has received, Mozilla has realized that Microsoft is going to put whatever-the-hell it wants to in as an external protocol, so unknown protocols should not be trusted. (Something that, apparently, Microsoft themselves has only realized in the last year or so.) shell: protocol is disabled in 0.9.2, and only whitelisted plugins will be trusted in 1.0. I think.
The only solution is to use a series of atomic explosions for a Hohmann transfer to put the moon in geosynchrous orbit! Which would produce a giantantic Moon always visible in the southern horizon of America! Which is now underwater due to tidal forces! Surf's up, Earthlings!
Never forget the human interface mantra: "the user is not like me".
Not to mention the side issue of batteries--maybe someday 12-hour laptop life will be the norm, but that day has not yet arrived. (Though I suppose it could arrive before mobile virtual machines arrive.)
Then when I left school, I got a laptop. Still, 80% of the times I leave my house, I'm not carrying either my iBook or TabletPC (the latter being only 2 pounds!) because it's just not worth carrying around extra, expensive to replace, baggage.
It seems to me there are huge security risks involved with such an approach, but I haven't read very far.
Maybe because you don't want to carry around the 15 inch lcd and keyboard required to do actual work? I dunno, I think this could be cool, though the security problems seem basically unsolvable--typing on someone else's keyboard is never trustworthy, and how could we prevent a kiosk from being able to observe what your mobile virtual machine is doing?